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NAS woes - why Windows 7 had me then lost me
Although I'm not an IT expert I am tech-literate having been an electronics engineer (microprocessor systems) and a user of MS OS's from Dos 3.<something>... thats atenure of over 20 years from a time when IT was not mainstream and there was a reason why I would spend a lot of my time studying the manuals and datasheets so the PC add-in cards I designed would work.
Fastforward to 2009:
I successfully (and in hindsight - gratefully) resisted the upgrade from XP to Vista however, in November 2009 when the HDD on my (home/personal) Dell Inspiron died I decided to clean install Win 7 professional 32 bit flavour - especially as the press had been remarkably good. First impressions were very good - fast and simple install... easy to setup home network and Internet etc. etc. Being a disaffected MicroSoft user (I have spent a great deal of my life fixing drivers, messing around with non-intuitive application software - in short a lot of time being unproductive with the so-called productivity tools) I felt myself warming to them with the positive experience I was having with Win 7. At last an OS that was doing (no more or no less) than what I expected from it. Indeed, I rushed out (figuratively speaking) and bought a copy for my wife's PC whilst I was in the MicroSoft happy place I'd never seen before. But it has been short-lived... normal service has been resumed. It started when I tried to connect a NAS drive to my homegroup network... I was not expecting any issues as the drive had been working without problem on the XP/Vista networked PC setup legacy I had... and now, all of a sudden, I feel like I am back in the late eighties again.
Despite the power of the Internet I am unable to find a solution to my woes... and - having sifted through the may forums containing similar issues with different manufacturers etc. - so are many others with their NAS connection problems too. I've descended into the depths of the security settings, reformatted the drive to the less-secure FAT32... even bought a new NAS chassis to put the Samsung disk into as I felt the Freecom enclosure could be problematic... but still I have only reached partial satisfaction:
I was able to connect to it once - this gave me a foolish sense of hope and optimism that I was just on the cusp of a solution. This was from the time prior to my wife's PC being upgraded from Vista. I managed to do this with a checky trick suggested in one of the forums; I created a short-cut in Vista and dropped it on my Win 7 desktop... it worked... hoorah! Well, at least until the re-boot... a repeat of the process did not yield the same result... Whilst I was in a cheeky frame of mind I thought I'd drop the short-cut into IE 8 to see what it would do with it... suspense filled the air... but not for long... I was astonished when it trashed all my applications (I don't know why - they had done nothing to IE 8!) and I had to revert to a previously known good state (to be fair, I think this is a good feature in Win 7).
- I can configure the drive via its IP address.
- I can FTP to and from the drive.
- I can see it listed on the network... but when I try and connect to it Win 7 tells me "<my drive> is not accessible. You might not have permission... blah blah blah. The network address is invalid"
And so to where I am today - the brief honeymoon is over and I am now returning to my disaffected state with MS. I find it astonishing that something as simple as hooking up a NAS has reverted to complexity and despair itself... on the plus side, I have discovered that I can control my PC from my iPod Touch whilst trying to solve this (and it works).
So, once again I am miffed... it appears that to use MicroSoft products you need to first take the advanced degree in MicroSoft... will they ever learn that consumers want something good, simple and functional? I expect a little flirting with the technology but I am now beyond nice-guy... Grrr... Come on Google, come on Apple - come on anybody else - hurry up and slay the dinosaur - they've been bland, boring and stealing my life for long enough.
Alas no response is required to this post... it's sent to let those who are feeling the same why I do that you're not alone... don't despair... it doesn't really matter... life is far more precious... I've wasted enough of my life on this and many other accumulations of MS related problems... this time I'll just take the easy (less sophisticated and satisfying) route of swapping the USB cable over between the PC's I want to backup once a week... I reckon the effort involved is likely to be a lot less and my emotional well-being will return to normal levels.
My soul is healed.
No MicroSoft staff were harmed in the production of this posting.
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